"C'mon, I'm gonna buy you a drink."

"I just want some sleep, Frank. Thanks, anyway."

Colt shrugged. "Yeah. We got a weekend's worth of work figurin' out how to squeeze all this gorgeous stuff down to half an hour."

Kinsman said, "Let me lock up all this gorgeous stuff in the vault." The pile of viewgraph slides was scattered across Colt's desk, each stamped along its border in bold red letters:

TOP SECRET.

It took both of them to carry the pile of slides over to Kinsman's cubbyhole. As he wearily tapped out the combina- tion on the electronic lock to his file cabinet, Colt beamed happily at him.

"Man, you were a ball of fire in there. You coulda sold General Motors stock to the Kremlin. You've really changed, man. You've really come out of your shell."

Over his shoulder Kinsman said, "I want to go to the Moon, Frank. Even if I have to bring the whole goddamned Aerospace Force with me."

Colt grinned. "You figured it out, huh? You wear The Man's uniform, you gotta do The Man's work. That's the law of life, my friend. But it's good to see you thinking like an Aerospace Force officer. Always thought you had a good head on your shoulders. No more of this peaceful hospital crap."

Kinsman piled the slides into the file drawer, then shut it and clicked the lock. He took the card atop the cabinet and turned it from the white OPEN side to the red LOCKED side.

"Frank," he said, turning back to Colt, "don't get the wrong idea. The Moon is still legally restricted, as far as military weaponry goes. The mining operation, okay. What they do with the ores after they leave the Moon is somebody else's business. But Moonbase will never be used as a place for war. Understand that. Never."

Colt's grin faded. "And how are you gonna get the Russians to go along with that? They're gonna be up there with you, remember? You start mining operations, they'll start mining operations."

"We'll work it out some way."

"Without fighting."

"That's right."

"Damn! You're just as dumb as you always were."

Late Monday afternoon Kinsman stood at the head of the long polished mahogany table in the private conference room of the Secretary of Defense. No need to turn out the 244 lights here; his slides were presented on a wall-sized rear projection screen. Kinsman spoke directly to the Secretary himself, despite the fact that the table was occupied by Marcot and two Under Secretaries of the Aerospace Force, four generals, including Sherwood, and a half-dozen civilian advisers to the Secretary. Colt was in the next room, feeding the slides into the projector.

Every man at the table watched Kinsman intently. The same thoughts were going through each of their heads, he knew: How does this affect my programs, my organization, my position in the Defense Department?

"To summarize," Kinsman said to the Secretary, "we can bring down the costs of strategic defense by a factor of five or more if we build the ABM satellites in orbital facilities, using raw materials mined from the Moon. The major industrial contractors are eager to begin space manufacturing opera- tions, but have hesitated to risk the resources necessary for the task. This program will, therefore, have significant spinoff value in the civilian economy. More than significant: the eventual payoff to the civilian economy could more than pay for the investment made on this program. Thank you, gentle- men."

The men around the table stirred, glanced at one anoth- er, then all settled their gazes on the Secretary. He sat at the far end of the table, looking relaxed and thoughtful. He was the tweedy gray university type. An unlit pipe was clamped in his teeth.

"We are deploying the ABM satellites under any circum- stances," General Sherwood said, filling the silence. "This plan allows us to build them more cheaply—and replace them more easily, in case of attrition."

The Defense Secretary nodded and started lighting his pipe.

"And by building the satellites in orbit," Kinsman added, still standing in front of the now-blank screen, "out of lunar materials, we not only get the SDI network, we get a powerful industrial capacity in space and a full-scale, perma- nent base on the Moon."

"A base," General Sherwood pointed out, "that will be under the administrative control of the Department of De- fense."

The Secretary slowly took the pipe from his mouth. "You mean you blue-suiters get your Moonbase, eh, Jim?"